We Know We Will Die. We Don't Believe It.

One thing I'll give Bangalore, and I don't give it much.

Since moving here I've started knowing myself a lot better. A lot more clearly. Not in a pleasant way — more like the way a room looks when somebody finally opens the curtains and you see what the furniture actually looks like. Back home there were enough people and enough noise around me that I never had to sit with my own head for very long. Here I do. Most evenings, in fact.

And a head that gets sat with starts producing things.

Last week it produced this. I was watching Dil Bechara — the adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars, and Sushant Singh Rajput's last film, released after he was already gone.

I'd read the book in college and loved it. That part has always embarrassed me slightly, and here's why.

I have never really believed in love.

Not the romantic-film version, anyway. From quite young I was fairly settled on this: selfless love doesn't exist. What we call love is an arrangement — two people exchanging things the other needs, and calling the exchange something nobler than it is. Affection for security. Attention for comfort. Everybody gets paid; nobody names the currency.

I think in binaries. I always have. It's useful at work and it has made me, by most measures, a hopelessly unromantic man.

So I could never explain why this story — of all of them — was one of the few I genuinely loved. Why a straightforward love story about two dying teenagers got past every defence I own, in college and again on a Tuesday night in a flat in Bangalore eleven years later.

It took me a long time to work out the answer. And when I finally did, it wasn't really about love at all.

They love each other because they know they're going to die

That's the whole thing.

Two young people, both terminally ill, both fully aware of the arithmetic. No illusions about a long life together, no pretending the ending might be different. They walk into it with the bill already printed.

And that's exactly why it isn't sentimental. A love story where nobody is dying can afford to be vague about why it matters. This one can't. Every hour has a cost attached, and both of them can see the number.

We're all working against the same deadline. Most of us just don't have a doctor's appointment that tells us the date.

Which makes it the most honest love story I've read — because it's the only kind that admits what's underneath all love, all the time, in every life, whether we're ill or not.

To know something and to experience it are two very different things

This is the sentence I keep returning to.

Ask anyone on the street whether they're going to die and they'll tell you yes, obviously, everybody does. It's not controversial. It's the single most reliably predicted event in the history of the species.

And yet almost none of us actually believe it.

Not really. Not in the way we believe the floor will hold our weight. We know it as information — a fact filed somewhere harmless, the way you know Pluto is far away. We do not know it as experience, as something that will happen to this body, these hands, this particular awareness reading this particular sentence.

We know that people die. We have never genuinely sat with the knowledge that I die.

And the gap between those two is the gap the whole of human culture has been built across.

Death is a cruel joke, if you look at it straight

Because consider the actual structure of the thing.

You are handed a mind capable of love. Of ambition. Of music that can take the top of your head off. Of hope, and planning, and the specific pleasure of a Sunday morning with nothing to do. You're given the capacity to build a life and populate it with people you would die for.

And then every single one of those possibilities is taken. Not some. All.

You are given the ability to care enormously, and then guaranteed the loss of everything you care about.

If you designed that deliberately it would be considered cruel. Tell me honestly that it doesn't look like an injustice — a joke whose punchline is the entire setup.

Most people never let themselves think this sentence all the way to the end. We've built a very sophisticated culture around making sure we don't have to.

Everything we build is a defence against this

And this is where I think the real argument lives.

Ernest Becker wrote a whole book on it — The Denial of Death — and his thesis is brutal and, I suspect, correct: almost everything we construct is a response to the knowledge of our own mortality.

Religion is the most direct version. There's another world, this isn't the end, the soul continues. Enormous comfort, and it addresses the problem head-on.

But look at how much of the rest of it does the same work, less obviously.

We build names. We want to be known, remembered, quoted. We write things, build companies, put our surname on something that will outlast us. Children, in part, are this too — a piece of you continuing past your own stopping point.

We call this ambition. A lot of it is a man quietly bargaining with the fact of his own ending.

I'm not exempt. I write a blog. Why does anyone write anything down? Some of it is to think clearly, which is what I usually tell myself. But some of it, if I'm honest, is the hope that a sentence survives the person who wrote it.

Becker called these immortality projects. Everyone has one. Most people never notice they're running one.

And love is the most effective one of all

Here's the part from the film that actually explains why it works on me.

When you fall properly in love, something strange happens to time. The world narrows to two people. The future stops being a countdown and becomes a vague, warm, open space. Everything outside the two of you drops a few decibels, including — especially — the thing underneath everything.

Mortality takes the back seat.

That's not a metaphor. I think that's functionally what happens. For a while, love delivers something that nothing else in human experience quite delivers: a convincing, temporary immortality. You surrender into another person and some part of you genuinely believes they can carry you past the ending.

They can't. Obviously they can't. But the belief is real while it lasts, and it is the closest thing to relief that most of us are ever given.

Which is why that story works on a man who doesn't believe in love. It isn't selling romance. It's showing you two people using love for the only thing it has ever actually been for — making the fact of dying bearable for a while.

Realistic people get called pessimists

This isn't an aside. I think it's half the reason nobody talks about any of this.

When I describe things the way I've described them above, people don't argue with me. That's the interesting part. Nobody has ever told me I'm factually wrong. They tell me I'm negative. Dark. Thoda zyada soch raha hai. Someone will do the thing where they tilt their head slightly and ask if everything's okay at home.

And notice what's happened there. The claim didn't get answered. It got diagnosed.

Because here's the distinction nobody makes, and it matters:

A pessimist says it will all be bad. A realist says it will all end.

Those are not the same sentence. The first is an opinion about quality and you're entitled to disagree with it. The second is a statement of fact with a hundred percent historical success rate, and disagreeing with it isn't optimism — it's just being wrong.

I'm not saying life is miserable. I don't think it is. I'm saying it stops. Those are different claims, and we have collapsed them into one word so that anybody who says the second one can be quietly moved into the category of people who need cheering up.

Calling a realist a pessimist is how we avoid answering him. It's not a rebuttal. It's a reclassification. And it's remarkably efficient — once you're the gloomy one at the table, nothing you said has to be dealt with.

The uncomfortable thing underneath the discomfort, I suspect, is this: we will all be forgotten. Not just us — the people who remember us, and then the people who remember them. Four generations, maybe five, and the full record of a life is gone. Ask yourself the name of your great-great-grandfather. You can't. He was a whole person. He had a favourite food and an argument he never won.

Say that at a dinner party and you become the difficult one.

It doesn't make you wrong. It just makes you inconvenient — and I've come to think that in most rooms, those two get treated as the same thing.

So why does any of it matter

And here's where I have to be honest about where this lands, because I don't want to leave it in the cold.

If everything ends, and the forgetting is total, you can go one of two directions.

The first is the one that looks logical: nothing matters, so why bother. That one is available, it's intellectually tidy, and I think it's wrong — not morally, but factually. It mistakes permanence for value. The argument assumes a thing only counts if it lasts, and I've never seen anyone actually defend that assumption. They just help themselves to it.

The second is what that film is actually arguing, underneath the illness and the tears.

Mortality isn't what makes love pointless. Mortality is the entire reason love weighs anything at all.

An infinite life would have infinitely many Tuesdays, which means no particular Tuesday could possibly matter. It's the limit that makes the thing precious. A sunset you could see forever is wallpaper. The person sitting across from you is not replaceable precisely because none of this runs twice.

The two of them in that story don't love each other despite knowing they're dying. They love each other with a seriousness most healthy people never manage, because they know. The deadline is what makes it real.

What I actually take from it

Not a lesson exactly. More a correction to how I'd been thinking.

I spent years treating love as a transaction and death as a technicality. Watching this, I think I had both backwards.

Death isn't a technicality. It's the context everything else happens inside. And love isn't a transaction — it's the one thing we've found that makes the context survivable.

It won't save anyone. Not one of us gets out. We all have the appointment, and nobody — no wife, no child, no god any of us can prove, no sentence I write on this blog — is going to cancel it.

But in the meantime there's this. The brief, improbable arrangement where two mortal people hold on to each other and, for a while, don't feel the ground moving.

That'll have to do. And having thought about it properly for the first time, I'm no longer sure that's a small thing.

I think it might be the whole thing.

One request, while I'm still in a position to make it

I'll end with something small, and I mean it completely seriously.

You've all heard how we talk in that house. The moment a person dies, the language changes within the hour. Body ko andar le jao. Body ready hai. Kitne baje nikaalenge body ko?

I understand why. It's practical. There's a lot to arrange and somebody has to say the words. And I know there's a whole philosophy behind it — the soul has left, what remains is only matter, and in some sense that's the most honest thing anyone says all day.

But I've sat in those rooms. And I've watched a man become a noun in the space of about forty minutes.

One morning you are Girish. By the afternoon you are the body.

Not "him." Not "he." It. Thirty-seven years of being a specific person with specific opinions, and the vocabulary drops you in under an hour.

So — whenever it is, and I'd like it to be a while — please don't call me the body.

Call me Girish. Girish ko le jao. It's clumsy and it will sound strange in the room and somebody will correct it. Say it anyway.

Not because it changes anything for me. By then nothing changes anything for me. But because the whole argument of this post is that we spend our lives running from the fact that I die — that we can hold "people die" comfortably and can't hold the first-person version for three seconds.

And that word is the final move in that same escape. Calling me the body is how the room protects itself from the sentence Girish is dead. It's a smaller, softer word, and it lets everyone get through the afternoon.

I'd rather you didn't have it. If I was a person for all of it, let me be a person for the last part of it too.

Use my name. It's the only thing of mine that's still working at that point.

…Tune in for next.